Do you have what it takes to survive on Mars? Abby Horne, the protagonist of Jordan Prosser’s second novel, Blue Giant, is certain that she has the chops. When an egocentric tech billionaire named Tor Skovgaard invites volunteers to join a mission to Mars, a “new chapter in the history of human civilisation”, Abby thinks she’s found her calling – or at least a way to escape her chaotic life.
To apply to MarsNow, she just has to shoot “a video of no longer than FIVE minutes in length stating why YOU are the BEST candidate to take HUMANITY to the STARS”. She must, she resolves, find a gimmick, “something I can do that no one else can”. Abby embarks on a training program that involves holding her breath and solving puzzles at the bottom of Fitzroy pool, desperate not to blow this one chance to shine.
The problem is, in spite of her knack for self-mythologising and reinvention, the luckless Abby can barely survive on Earth. Her thirtysomething life in the inner-north of Melbourne is sustained by delusions, gallons of cheap wine and the love of her patient best friend, Niki. She’s probably suicidal, probably an alcoholic, probably in the throes of a serious mental health episode. If she looked at her bank balance, she’d find she was broke too, having frittered away an early windfall in the fashion game. She ignores traumatic flashbacks to the time she had to flee a bushfire in a boat on a family holiday just as she ignores Niki’s gentle prompts to see her therapist. Everything is fine!
Abby is the blue giant of the novel’s title, a flagbearer for her generation. Her new friend Oscar, who also has his sights on Mars, explains to her that blue giants are the “live fast, die young” stars, they burn hot and then “explode into supernovas and create new black holes”. Like Prosser’s 2024 debut, Big Time, Blue Giant is a novel whose characters deal with the world being on fire by trying to burn themselves out as quickly as possible. Fire follows Abby, she tells the diminishing number of people who will listen, and she does everything she can to fan the flames.
Where Big Time was set in a near future dystopia, Blue Giant unfolds in the polycrisis of the 2020s. The tech billionaires may have different names, but this is our world and Abby hates it: “there was nothing left to discover and very little left to solve”.
Blue Giant is a contemporary, picaresque novel, packed with plot points, twists and extravagant set pieces. These include a road trip along the Hume Highway, a school reunion for the ages, the 2025 Los Angeles fires, prison and Antarctica. There’s a full-on action movie culmination to the MarsNow plotline, complete with SWAT teams. Abby becomes a celebrity, her face gets broadcast on every screen in the world, a bevy of adoring fans dress up like her. Things move fast, the satire dressed as an action movie becomes a fairytale becomes a quiet morality tale.
But Blue Giant isn’t really about MarsNow, it’s about Abby and whether she can break free of the black hole of denial and delusion. If Abby thinks she might make it to Mars, no one else in the book does. For all her lies, selfishness and general stinky chaos, she’s a fabulous central character, as funny and creative as she is obnoxious. Niki recognises the life force that surges through Abby, and so does Oscar. There’s a deep current of melancholy running through Blue Giant, and Abby’s struggles to find a reason to live are both hilarious and extremely poignant.
Like Abby, Prosser is prone to picking up big ideas and running with them, only to change direction on a dime. The novel’s zany swings and shifts in emotional register get a bit nauseating at times, but they mirror the jolting affective distortions of following the climate catastrophe on our phones, watching extinction scenarios interleaved with celebrity crap and banal frippery. Blue Giant, like Abby, has big ambitions; it is absurd and profane and deadly serious all at once. It deals with climate terror and suicidality through constipation gags and burlesque comedy. If this makes for a pretty unruly novel, the map matches the territory.
Abby’s frantic efforts to cope with the shitshows of 21st-century life, we come to understand, are a survival strategy. She burns hot and flames out – and then? No gimmicks required. Gravity prevails. She has to adapt and make a home for herself, along with the rest of us, on the planet that she actually inhabits.
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Blue Giant by Jordan Prosser is published by UQP ($34.99)
